Ugali, Nyama Choma and the Zanzibar Pizza: Food in Tanzania With Kids

Food in Tanzania on a family trip is two different countries. The safari camps, where a bush kitchen produces three meals a day that surprise everyone, and Zanzibar, where the coast cooks with coconut and spice.

On safari the lodge feeds you. Breakfast before the drive or in the bush at a table under an acacia. A picnic lunch box in the vehicle, or a buffet back at camp. Dinner of soup, a main and a pudding by lantern, with a children’s option that nobody has to ask for. The chefs are good and they will make a plain pasta for a picky child every night without a word.

Ugali is the staple of the mainland, stiff maize porridge cut into slabs and used to scoop stew. Nyama choma, grilled goat or beef, at a roadside place on the drive between parks. Chapati, the flatbread, with everything. Mandazi, the fried dough, with chai in the morning. Kids eat the chapati and the mandazi and try the ugali once.

The island

Zanzibar is Swahili food. Pilau rice spiced with cloves and cardamom, fish in coconut curry, octopus grilled at the beach, urojo soup from a cart in Stone Town. Coconut in everything, because the trees are everywhere.

The Zanzibar pizza at Forodhani night market is not a pizza. A square of dough filled with minced meat, egg, cheese, mayonnaise and whatever the boy at the griddle adds, folded and fried. Or the sweet one with Nutella and banana. Every child orders one and every child orders a second.

Sugarcane juice pressed by hand with lime and ginger. Fresh fruit at breakfast, mango, papaya, passion fruit, the small sweet bananas. Bottled water everywhere, and the spice tea at the farm. Tusker or Kilimanjaro beer for the adults at sundown on the terrace.

Planning Tanzania with kids? Start with the full Tanzania family travel guide, or send me the ages and the dates and I will come back with what is really available.